[fpc-pascal] problems compiling FPC

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2012-10-17 10:10, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> 
> Some slack would be desirable: stable is 2.6.0 but there are known
> issues which are fixed by 2.6.1.

Nope, the FPC developers made the rules quite clear! Not even the fixes
branch is guaranteed to compile FPC Trunk. ONLY the last released FPC is
guaranteed. I have even stumbled over this too, where the fixes branch
couldn't compile FPC Trunk, but the latest released version could.

The fixes branch is "mislabelled". Contrary to the name, not only fixes
get applied to that branch. In recent months, more and more "minor new
features" got added to the fixes branch too.


> Perhaps we need something like
> "FORCE=1" to allow a minor version bump to be accepted, or "FORCE=1.1"
> to accept anything up to 2.7.1.

This is exactly what I mentioned too, but only for very specific cases
(though I don't know if such cases exist). Allow a --force or something
parameter to allow the developer to use a different starting compiler
(thus ignoring the version check), but ONLY if they know what they are
doing.


> However the thing that's really needed in my opinion is a clear
> statement for each SVN tag which FPC version should be used for

That will be a ridiculous amount of work. The existing rule of always
using the latest released FPC as the starting compiler is good enough.


Regards,
   Graeme.